Warm Feelings #1 ~ COP27 ~ Feelings are not necessarily facts

Let's get this party started

Hello, and welcome to Warm Feelings, the latest incarnation of the Hannah Waters blogosphere. I’m a science journalist and editor on the climate beat at the environmental magazine Audubon. In this new project I want to explore climate change as a felt experience. Thanks for being my first subscribers. I plan to include an essay and some links in each edition, and it will surely evolve over time. My longtime dream is to have a climate change advice column, so please send me any questions you could use a climate nerd’s help on. And onto the first edition!

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Watching COP27 from afar

It’s easy to be cynical about the United Nations Climate Change Conferences, or COP. World leaders are now gathered in Egypt for their 27th meeting (gift link to NYTimes liveblog) to reduce carbon emissions—and seemingly little progress has been made in all that time. Global emissions and temperatures continue to rise. The past 8 years have been the 8 warmest on record. “So-called leaders are flying in to show that they care, but all they care about is drinking champagne with C.E.O.s,” Dominika Lasota, a Polish activist with Greta Thunberg’s group Fridays for Future, told the NYTimes. Or as Greta has said in the past to sum up the talks: “Blah blah blah.”

There is some truth to those sentiments. For some attendees COP is a carbon-emitting flurry of air travel to an opportunity for networking and business deals. Indeed last year, at COP26 in Glasgow, the major outcome was a set of global finance rules to guide financiers and corporations whose top priority is to turn climate change into another market opportunity—a focus in stark contrast to the ongoing demands for reparations (or “loss and damage” funds) made by nations that have contributed least to climate change but whose people are already suffering the harshest impacts.

But we have to pay attention. These meetings have evolved into sites of activism for nations demanding justice. This year all eyes are on Pakistan, which this spring and summer endured heatwaves followed by floods that affected 33 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes, and killed more than 1,500. Scientific analyses by the independent group World Weather Attribution show the disasters were made more likely by our carbon-supercharged atmosphere. For many years small island nations that have already retreated inland or relocated due to sea-level rise have taken the global stage to demand reparations. We can expect more of that this year.

The meetings are also a site for world powers to show their wickedness. Last year, in the final hours of COP26, leaders from three of the world’s most powerful and polluting countries—United States, China, and India—huddled to make a last-minute change to the agreement. Holding the remainder of the world hostage, they edited the text to commit to a phasedown instead of a phaseout of fossil fuels. The revolting behavior resulted in global outcry, especially from the countries that most need reparations. It was a radicalizing moment and I believe is part of this year’s intense focus on getting vulnerable people their due. This year for the first time in 27 years “loss and damage” is part of COP’s official agenda.

So, while I can appreciate Greta’s cynicism after 27 years of “blah blah blah,” we cannot dismiss these meetings. Addressing climate change is the hardest feat ever posed to humanity: acts of global solidarity, of all nations acting together for the common good, not just once but repeatedly for decades and longer. No one ever said this was going to be easy. This year headlines going into the conference are already focused on reparations. The pressure is on, and U.N. secretary general António Guterres is continuing to use his perch to center the catastrophes faced by the most vulnerable people, warning in his opening remarks in his typical poetry: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” Those of us mostly watching climate hell from afar can’t ignore these demands for justice, for funds to help people survive, just because it isn’t happening here—yet. We must stand with them.

So, pay attention. I don’t have hope that this meeting will save the world (wouldn’t that be grand?) but each is an opportunity to shuffle ever-so-slightly forward by heeding those in need and being reminded of the true nature of our own leaders.

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What I’m reading

How do we mourn an island? Where do we mark its grave?: The Marshall Islands are coral atolls, coral that has crown over the rim of a volcano and then exposed as sea levels drop, “a string of pearls floating on the ocean.” This essay by poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands government, has sat with me all week. One way to remember an island disappearing beneath the waves: “My daughter’s name is Peinam. She is named after a parcel of land situated on Mejrirok, an islet of Jaluit atoll. It’s our lamoren, or our clan’s land passed down through generations from our maternal side . . . Other children’s names includes Mejatto, Bokaitoktok, Patto. Children with thick legs and full tummies, ambling around bearing the history and name of these ancient islands we call home.” Read more essays in a beautiful series from the Guardian “Before it is lost: Essays from the Pacific Islands of what might be, can’t be, and has already been lost to the climate crisis.”

Arctic keeps heating up: Out of sight, out of mind? Recent research shows the Arctic has warmed 4 times faster than the rest of the globe over the past 43 years. The summer of 2020 was the region’s warmest in four years and wildfires burned 4.7 million hectares in 2019 and 2020, accounting for nearly half of all burned area in the Arctic since 1982, says research out last week. (Nature perspective piece here.) It’s hard to think about the frozen Arctic on fire. This is a classic example of a feedback loop—where global warming triggers ecological cycles (such as wildfires) that then warm the planet even more by releasing more carbon. I am low-key obsessed with climate feedback loops. Me in 2015: “These feedback mechanisms are so important to climate change that, if they didn’t exist, our carbon dioxide emissions wouldn’t be anything to worry about . . . “It’s all these other feedback systems that are built into the climate system that take that one degree of warming and amplify it to four degrees,” says Brian Soden, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.” The piece holds up imo.

The Village Schoolteacher by Liu Cixin: I cried after reading this short story on the train yesterday. Liu has a love for humanity that comes through in this story (and his other writing). From the intro to his collection To Hold Up the Sky (in which I read this story): “When you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts.”

Hollywood ignores climate change: Of 37,453 scripted TV episodes and films released between 2016 and 2020, only 2.8% acknowledged climate change, Sammy Roth at the LATimes reports on a USC report. I don’t even need those stories to be about climate change, simply acknowledge the reality we’re living in! Hollywood’s ear-covering is a form of climate denial. I want to see a climate change rom com, I want Succession but with the familial dysfunction and machinations of the Exxon dynasty, I want an HGTV show that greens homes by installing heat pumps and solar panels. I am deadly serious and if you want to team up on a pitch/script, respond to this email.

What I’m listening to: Low’s Hey What and Double Negative. Godspeed, Mimi Parker, who died of ovarian cancer on Saturday. Parker: “When people get a diagnosis, some people have a tendency to ask why, why me? I never had that. It was always, why not? We're all subject to whatever random this and that happens. So that has just changed my perspective completely. Our time can be cut short and what do we do with that time that we have. We try to make each day mean something."

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Feelings are not necessarily facts

My sister likes to remind me that “feelings are facts,” meaning that whatever we feel is valid—there is no unreasonable emotional response to a given situation. Feelings are important intuitive information. But that doesn’t mean we should always act on them. Feelings can be misleading. What is a reasonable response to past circumstance doesn’t necessarily translate to the present. And sometimes new information in the present can alter how we remember the past.

Here’s a recent tale of false memory that sets the stage nicely for this newsletter.

It’s been a warm fall in Brooklyn. This weekend I sweated in a T-shirt. It was sunny and 78 degrees, the kind of weather you’d call “unseasonably” warm for November—meaning weather that surpasses expectations. It was a warm Halloween, too, at 64 degrees. As I chatted with friends through the week the season’s felt warmth came up often. I found myself remarking: “Remember when we were kids, and we had to wear winter coats during Halloween? We had to cover up our costumes?” Yes, everyone agreed, I remember that. It must be climate change.

We enjoyed this little conversational factoid, these warm feelings. A sense of nostalgia, righteousness, and loss all bundled together in a few sentences. But I wondered: Was it true? Did I really bundle up on most Halloweens? Or was this a perceptive mind trick informed by my present knowledge of climate change?

Naturally I dug into the historical data. I looked up the high and low temperatures on Halloween for my lifespan in Brooklyn (my current location), central New Jersey (where I spent most of my childhood), and Rosemount, Minnesota, the hometown of a friend who very memorably dressed up as “Minnesota Halloween” when we were 20, wearing a down jacket and snow boots over a princess costume.

You can view the results here. In short, it does not appear Halloween is significantly warmer now than it was 30 years ago. The temperature trendlines go up slightly, but not enough to support the conversational anecdote. Perhaps there were more frequent cold days in my youth, even if the average is pretty much the same? Alas, no, I counted the number of high temps below 55 and lows below 50, which is my best guess of how cold it would have to be to be forced to wear a jacket over, instead of a sweatshirt under, one’s costume. But the results are not anything you’d expect beyond the average. (I invite deeper analysis by a trained statistician.)

Drat. Apparently Halloween was rarely very cold—but the one or two times it was cold enough to bundle up were upsetting enough to sear the event in my memory.

This doesn’t mean this fall isn’t unseasonably warm on the whole, or that the climate isn’t changing in a way that we experience through daily weather. The scientific study of how seasonal events are being altered by the warming climate is known as climate phenology. It’s clear that spring is occurring earlier and earlier each year in many places. When the Earth’s orbit brings us closer to the sun, the incoming energy interacts with increased carbon molecules in the atmosphere to spread heat more quickly than it did 100 years ago. Warm temperatures arrive weeks earlier, triggering a cascade of springtime events such as flowering, insect hatch, and bird migration. The National Phenology Network tracks these trends, and Scott Weidensaul wrote beautifully about climate change’s effects on bird migration in Audubon’s spring issue.

But in fall the effects are lesser known. My longtime friend (and college lab partner) Amanda Gallinat in 2015 published a review paper detailing the state of ecological knowledge on climate change’s influence on fall phenology called “Autumn, the neglected season in climate change research”—definitely worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. The data we do have, she writes, suggest that warming temperatures have altered when trees lose their leaves, and in some species have delayed bird migration. But unlike spring, when the sun’s warmth triggers ecological processes, in fall warmth may be less important than, say, the first freeze of winter—which according to EPA data is occurring later now in the vast majority of U.S. states than it did 100 years ago.

All of which is to say—yes, fall is lengthening in many places in the United States. But we’re probably not feeling it enough yet to alter our Halloween wear.

So, here I am, launching my newsletter with a story about how I was wrong. I think it’s appropriate, though, to show you how I operate. Yes, I want to talk about our warm feelings on a warming planet. But I know that while feelings are meaningful—the Halloween anecdote reflects a true trend of warming temperatures—they are not necessarily facts. And I will always apply the kind of journalistic, fact-checked rigor to my writings here that I would apply to anything I publish under a formal masthead.

Warmly yours,
Hannah

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